Recommended reading

An extraordinary week. This blog post by Kevin Smith, J.D from Scholarly communications @ Duke is another nice summary of Elsevier and public access legislation stories. See also my post.

The Elsevier Boycott and its relationship to WUSM Although written from WU School of Medicine perspective, the "Facts and Figures about Elsevier's Impact at Becker Library" is useful in describing pros and cons of the current WU no-cancellations contract with Elsevier and the situation that many Elsevier journals, especially the Cell Press titles, are still heavily used and prime locations for many biologists.. Even given the "pros" I can't imagine that the Danforth campus will continue this contract much longer. We'll see.

Is the pot calling the kettle black? This blog post, by Stuart Shieber in The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication, compares rising tuition/cost of attendance prices with rising journals prices (he calls this hyperinflation of journal prices). His price information is from what Harvard University pays. I think he makes a good case that what has been going on with institutional subscription prices in recent years is really something extraordinary.